With all the sound and the fury, we wondered if anyone had even yet dealt with this install limit? Mark DeSanto, who reviewed the game, installed his review copy of Spore on his main gaming PC twice, once on his laptop, and then again on the gaming PC. Four installs, across two systems. The fourth installation received an authentication error when he tried to log into the game. A quick call to EA's customer support brought an oddly-happy voice on the line, and once informed of the issue, he quickly determined that there was a network issue on their side; Spore's authentication servers were down. So it was DRM in general that was causing the problem, not an issue specific to EA or Spore.

We hung up the phone and waited roughly fifteen minutes to call EA tech support once more; we were hoping to get someone else to get a different opinion, as we were sure we had used up all our installation attempts. Calling back, another happy voice—female this time—checked into the account and determined that we had only registered the game twice—not four times. Spore was only registering installs on new machines. The game booted with no issue soon after; it seems to have truly been a network issue.